PROLOGUE

When the monster finally came through the door, he was wearing a mask.

She stared and stared at him, amazed that no one else could see through the disguise. He was the neighbor next door, watering his forsythia. He was the stranger who smiled across an elevator. He was the kind man who took a toddler’s hand to help him cross the street. Can’t you see? she wanted to scream. Don’t you know?

Beneath her, the chair was unforgiving. Her hands were folded as neatly as a schoolgirl’s, her shoulders were squared; but her heart was all out of rhythm, a jellyfish writhing in her chest. When had breathing become something she had to consciously remember to do?

Bailiffs flanked him, guiding him past the prosecutor’s table, in front of the judge, toward the spot where the defense attorney was sitting. From the corner came the sibilant hum of a TV camera. It was a familiar scene, but she realized she had never seen it from this angle. Change your point of view, and the perspective is completely different .

The truth sat in her lap, heavy as a child. She was going to do this.

That knowledge, which should have stopped her short, instead coursed through her limbs like brandy. For the first time in weeks, she didn’t feel as if she were sleepwalking on the ocean floor, her lungs fiery, holding on to the breath she’d taken before she went under—a breath that would have been bigger, more deliberate, had she known what was coming. In this horrible place, watching this horrible man, she suddenly felt normal again. And with this feeling came the most wonderfully normal thoughts: that she hadn’t wiped down the kitchen table after breakfast; that the library book which had gone missing was behind the dirty clothes hamper; that her car was fifteen hundred miles overdue to have the oil changed. That in the next two seconds, the bailiffs escorting him would step back to give him privacy to speak to his attorney.

In her purse, her fingers slipped over the smooth leather cover of her checkbook, her sunglasses, a lipstick, the furry nut of a Life Saver, lost from its package. She found what she was looking for and grabbed it, surprised to see that it fit with the same familiar comfort as her husband’s hand.

One step, two, three, that was all it took to come close enough to the monster to smell his fear, to see the black edge of his coat against the white collar of his shirt. Black and white, that was what it came down to.

For a second she wondered why no one had stopped her. Why no one had realized that this moment was inevitable; that she was going to come in here and do just this. Even now, the people who knew her the best hadn’t grabbed for her as she rose from her seat.

That was when she realized she was wearing a disguise, just like the monster. It was so clever, so authentic; nobody really knew what she had turned into. But now she could feel it cracking into pieces. Let the whole world see , she thought, as the mask fell away. And she knew as she pressed the gun to the defendant’s head, she knew as she shot him four times in quick succession, that at this moment she would not have recognized herself.